By Rebecca Gagnon ’23
Features Editor
Photo by Rebecca Gagnon ‘23.
From exploring different parts of spiral galaxies to examining photographs of an Indian dancer by an American photographer, the Mount Holyoke campus is bustling with life as summer research continues.
Ajay Sinha, a professor in the art history and architectural studies departments, is using the summer to continue one of his research projects, a book, with the help of architecture major Sarannya Sharrma ’23. Sinha previously taught Sharrma in one of his classes and offered her an opportunity to help him with the manuscript of his book over the summer.
“[The book] basically revolves around an Indian classical dancer that brought the Indian classical dance to the West, in the 1930s, or in the … interwar period,” Sharrma explained, “and this is also when there's a lot of cross-cultural pain … taking place between the West and the East.”
“It's a project on cross-cultural global photography,” Sinha began, “and it is centered on a group of photographs that I discovered first at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, in 2015.”
Sinha’s interest began when he decided to create a teaching syllabus for Indian photography and started to research the subject. Later, while at a conference, he was able to examine a collection of South Asian photography, and this is when he came across the photographs that “zapped” him, as he recalled.
Sinha then began to think about each detail of the photographs and the people involved in capturing these moments. This research planted seeds for an article. Then, as his work continued to develop, the project soon grew into a book. Sinha has spent the past six years working on this project.
“The subject [of the photographs],” Sinha explained, “was this Indian dancer by the name of Ram Gopal, and the photographs were taken by an American photographer by the name of Carl Van Vechten.”
Ram Gopal, born in Bangalore in 1912, was an Indian dancer who began learning the art of dance at a very young age. He was trained in the three main Indian dance styles at the time, Kathakali, Bharatanatyam and Kathak, while also being self-taught in other areas of Indian dance. Gopal is considered one of the first people to show such a variety of Indian dances to a Western audience, from whom he received rave reviews.
Still, Gopal was controversial among dancers.
“He’s extremely experimental,” Sharrma explained. “A lot of traditionalists did not really approve of his style of dance, because he would experiment with different dance forms, and he was a self-educated, learned elite Indian man who was … very eloquent and knowledgeable.”
Carl Van Vechten was born in Iowa in 1880 and also began to explore the arts, starting with music and opera. He later began to write as a critic of dance and music while taking up photography soon after. By the 1920s, he had written several books and become involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement, a golden age for African American culture. This movement resulted in the production of works in literature, theatre, music and art. Vechten supported the Harlem Renaissance through the consumption of Black arts and frequent visits to the movement’s birthplace, the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
“[He was] very involved in that one side of it,” Sinha said. “I mean, given it was the Jim Crow era, right?” To Sinha, given the racial segregation of the 1940s, Vechten was being “very provocative.”
“Part of his provocation also was that he … was very interested in interracial … homosexual relations,” Sinha explained. “Imagine in the 1930s, you could be killed for that, but he was provocative both in his writing and then in photography also.”
Sinha further shared how, although Vechten was an amateur photographer, he turned his apartment in Manhattan into a photo studio and invited people he knew in the arts, from musicians to dancers, to participate in photoshoots using a German 35 mm Leica camera. That is how the pictures of Ram Gopal that Sinha discovered ended up in Vechten’s collection.
Sinha explained how he began to explore the relationship between Gopal, Vechten and the German camera in his book. Vechten had a fascination for the German camera, an aspect Sinha likewise explores in his work. He argues that there’s more to the situation than a simple interaction between dancer and photographer. To Sinha, the intrigue comes from, “a triangulation between the photographer who's exercising his agency and … bringing his own cultural … baggage and the dancer, who's also bringing a kind of a cultural assumption about his body and dance with the photograph, but also the German camera that is kind of tying the two together.” Sinha expressed that the last two parts of the equation are the refraction from the camera and the visual images that result from this three-piece collaboration.
Another topic Sinha covers in the book is the idea of equality. Sinha inferred that the photographs he examined offered something unique in the context of the 1930s. “The photographs are proposing equality,” Sinha explained. “I could see that the dancer is manipulating the image as much as the photographer is manipulating the image, and so [there is] this kind of tug of war that … might have happened in the photo studio. So, equalizing, but in this kind of very unstable sort of way, right, became the subject of my analysis.”
Sharrma also found the ideas of the camera that Sinha discusses in the book intriguing and appreciates how he presents the concepts to the readers. “What I love about the book,” Sharrma began, “is that it's got … a very unbiased and … a third perspective view on how both subjects, which is the photographer and the dancer are brought together, not through their ideas, but the medium itself, which is the camera lens.” Sharrma later added how the book comprises interpretation and perception, which she believes are well laid out.
Each chapter in the book consists of individual topics such as the dancer, Ram Gopal; the photographer, Carl Van Vechten; the camera itself — the exposure, or as Sinha also refers to it as, the frame; and how both the photographer and the dancer interact with the camera.
Sinha expressed that an interesting aspect of writing the book was exploring different interpretations of each dance move in the photograph. He explained how, with Indian dance, there is a whole vocabulary of specific hand gestures and their meanings. “It’s all body language in a way, and then in performance, in choreography, it can unfold, and there are some mimetic references.” Sinha laughed. “You know, how do you show the flight of geese or the unfolding of lotus?” With only a photograph to reference, instead of the entire dance, Sinha has had to interpret what Gopal meant by each move in the photographs rather than getting the full “narrative.”
“Like Professor Sinha also mentions in the book, it’s very easy for an audience member, who knows this classical dance, to know what the dancer’s saying while he's performing,” Sharrma explained. Through the four-minute dance, the audience watches the storyline play out as the dancer narrates. She continued, “Unlike when he’s being photographed in a studio, and that’s just one still image taken from that four-minute narrative.”
At this time, the book is in the final stages of the manuscript as it approaches the fall 2021 deadline. During this point of the writing process, Sinha explained he has been looking at the manuscript as a whole one more time. He has begun to revise based on reviewers’ comments, finalizing the research and the bibliography and looking at Sharrma’s notes.
Sinha also recalled he initially did not plan on having help with the manuscript, but the department was able to put some funds together for Sharrma to help him, acting as a second pair of eyes to see if there was anything he overlooked. “[Sharrma] is also a dancer of classical Indian dance,” Sinha laughed. “So how perfect could that be? She actually can look at the technical passages of the dance and look at the photographs, see what I’ve missed even in terms of content using her expertise in Indian classical dance. Isn’t that perfect?”
The two meet every Monday in Amherst to discuss any notes Sharrma had on the chapters that she previously read. “I started actively reading … one or two chapters throughout the week,” Sharrma explained. “If there [is] any suggestion to be made, or any image to be omitted, or any footnote or bibliography or image reference to pin down, I do that, as well as actively read the chapter.”
Sharrma explained they currently have three documents, one for the bibliography, one for footnotes and one for images. This is how they keep track of everything in the book in order not to lose the information, should they need to refer back to it at any point.
Although this is the first time Sinha is receiving help from a student for summer research, he expressed that trust and getting to know one another is a key part of a successful collaboration. He also noted his advice for students would be to work with professors with whom one has chemistry. This way, the collaboration becomes mutually beneficial.
Sharrma’s advice would be to read a lot. “If you're passionate about something, any topic, just start reading,” Sharrma said. “Read articles written by professors at Mount Holyoke, or the Five College Consortium. Then send them an email telling them that ‘I really liked this particular discussion topic,’ and that’s how you build a network.”
Sinha later added that professors also appreciate when students reach out to them to discuss different topics. “We want your success, you know,” Sinha said. “We are invested in your success and so, you know, whatever we can do it … we will do … we root for you.”